Steve and Paul: Two Men and a Typewriter

Steve Murphy has spent much of his life in uniform, starting with four years in the Navy as a GMM, where he earned the Navy Expeditionary Medal and Navy Unit Commendation. Afterwards he did a stint in the Army National Guard. As if that wasn’t enough, Steve then spent 23 years as a police officer, working 9 of those years as a SWAT sniper. So naturally, he writes science-fiction, fantasy, and space opera.

Paul Barrett has had multiple careers, including rock and roll roadie, theater stage manager, television camera operator, mortgage banker, and support specialist for Microsoft Excel. This eclectic mix allowed him to go into his true love: motion picture production.

Tell us a bit about your most recent work.

We have two most recents. The first is Knight Ascendant,  the second novel in the Knights of the Flaming Star series, which is about a group of intergalactic mercenaries. Think Guardians of the Galaxy with magic. It’s a standalone like the first book, with a few throughlines. We came up with the characters in our 20s and they stuck with us all these years. We are currently working on the third book of the series.

The second is the Malaise Falchion, which we call JRR Tolkien meets Elmore Leonard. It’s about a dwarf private eye who gets in over his head trying to help a femme fatale. Paul wrote the first novel, but the second book is in the works and is being done by Paul and Steve.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

Teamwork is a big theme in all our novels. It started with Paul’s Necromancer Saga, where strangers became friends to achieve a goal to benefit all, and carried into the Knights series, where the mercenaries work together for a common good. We’re not fans of this recent trend of teams that have such disparate personalities that they are constantly bickering about how to get things done. That’s not how real professional teams work. Not to say our teams don’t have their issues, but when push comes to shove, they fall behind their leader and do what needs to be done.

What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer? 

Paul: For whatever reason, I’ve always had a creative streak. I remember being 5 years old and helping my dad cook dinner and pretending we were doing a cooking show. So, I tended toward the visual arts. But then our class had a creative writing assignment when I was eight, and I wrote a story about Ziggy, the comic book character, dealing with an invasion by the Spiders From Mars. (David Bowie was big at that time). I really enjoyed the idea of creating my own worlds and characters, and carried on doing it throughout the years.

Steve: It really started with Dungeons and Dragons and enjoying telling stories in that setting. It was solidified when I had a high school English teacher who encouraged creative writing and saw that I had stories to tell, and was non-traditional in that she allowed me to write short stories in lieu of doing many of the assignments. That both saved my grades in English and validated that I had something to say, and that inspiration carried through even to today.

What inspires you to write? 

Well, it certainly isn’t the paycheck. I think for both of us it’s just the fun (and pain) of creating things that don’t exist and hoping that people enjoy coming on the journeys created by her feverish minds and find a little bit of themselves in the characters that deal with the challenges we put them through.

What of your works has meant the most to you?

That’s easy. For both of us it’s Knight Errant, the first book in the Knights series. We spent a lot of time with the characters and the story, and it was also our first published novel as a team, so it holds a special place. And we still enjoy the characters and love to see them grow and change as characters at the same time we do as writers.

If you have any former project to do over to make it better, which one would it be, and what would you do?

That would also be Knight Errant. It was our first project as a team, and we painted ourselves into a lot of corners that, while not obvious at the time, came to hamstring us in the second novel. That’s what comes from not thinking ahead to a second novel. At the time, we were happy to be able to get a first novel.

As an example, the concept of “ripspace” was nowhere near as developed as it should have been for such a complex idea, especially as it is the backbone of how travel happens in the universe. Basically, our version of hyperspace.

If we had to do it over, we would plan our worldbuilding better and make sure events and character arcs served the concept of continuing the story. Now we managed to resolve a lot of this in the second book in such a way that no one would ever know, but it certainly made a lot more work for us than it needed to be.

What writers have influenced your style and technique?

For Paul, what he can remember is Steven King, Robin Hobb, and Raymond Feist. Lately, he’s fallen in love with Joe Abercrombie. For Steve, it was Frank Herbert, David Eddings (before he knew that particular twisted history), and Piers Anthony. For both of them, it was JRR Tolkien and Robert Heinlein.

Of course, the question of influence begs the question of emulation. Do you emulate the writers that influence you? We think you do at the beginning as you try to find your own voice. That early carbon copying gives you the courage to start in the first place, and though those stories almost never see the light of day, they help establish the foundation of the style you eventually develop.

Where would you rank writing on the "Is it an art or is it a science continuum?" Why?

For us, it’s almost totally an art. Science implies rigid structure (form, style) with little room for improvisation. While form and style are always in the back of the mind, it is not the thing that drives the process. That may come later as editors get their mitts on it, but for our submission draft, it’s all art all the time.

What is the most difficult part of your artistic process? 

If you take “artistic” out of the question, the hardest part is finding the time to put butt into seat and clicking the keys to make the words that create the chapters that finish the book. The artistic part is “easy” in the sense that we almost always know where we want to go (with the occasional block like every writer has). It’s the manual work of slapping the ideas onto the screen that stymies the process. To paraphrase Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, real life finds a way to totally screw you over.

How do your writer friends help you become a better writer? Or do they not? 

First off, the only writer friends we have are each other, and we constantly push each other to be better. Okay, that’s not entirely true. We do have another friend named Ed McKeown, who has generously read our early drafts and offered suggestions to improve them. Whether we always listened to him is another story. And we do have acquaintances like Chuck Wendig and Delilah S. Dawson, who inspire us by being so damn successful that we want to be better to spite them. Or at least join their circle. 😊

What does literary success look like to you? 

That is a multi-level question. In one respect, we are successful in the sense that we have several published novels that we are happy to say were done without the use of AI, which is more than some people who write can say. So that is a level of success, and we are happy with that aspect. It’s also a success to get positive feedback from readers and know that you touched them in some way.

But the next level we would like to see is the even rarer stratum of making enough sales to do it as a full time job and be able to make the car payment and the mortgage and keep the dogs and cats in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. It’s an ongoing process and we will continue to strive to reach the next plateau.

Any other upcoming projects you would like to plug?

Next up on the scene is the final book in Paul’s solo Necromancer Saga, titled A Scream of Destruction, which should release the fourth quarter of 2025.

For Steve and Paul, we are working on the third book of The Knights of the Flaming Star and the second book of The Spade Case Files. They should both be out on some undetermined date in 2026.

But most exciting is that we are jumping into the realm of self-publishing with a LitRPG adjacent novel (we’re being told they are called progressing novels). It’s called The Adventures of Brambly Buttertoes and The Keep On Near The Borderland and is about a halfling who gets involved with a dungeon-delving group and fights more tropes than you can shake a stick at. It will be released as soon as we can get the artist to finish designing the cover.

For more information, visit: 

There are several places you can find us. The first is twomenandatypewriter.com, and we promise we will update it with more current information soon.

You can always buy our books on Amazon. And two of them (Malaise Falchion and Knight Errant) are available on Audible. You can also buy directly from us at https://www.sansperf.com/product-category/books/

Buy directly from us and we’ll sign them (assuming you want us to.)